Citigroup fumbled spectacularly in April 2024 when it accidentally credited a customer account with a mind-boggling $81 trillion—enough money to fund multiple government budgets or buy several tech giants. The intended amount? A measly $280. Let that sink in. Someone at Citi typed in a few extra zeros. Billions became trillions. Oops.
The banking error, while massive, didn’t last long. A third employee caught the mistake after 90 minutes, and the transaction was reversed within hours. Two employees had failed to catch the error before it was processed. No harm done, right? Well, except to Citigroup‘s already tarnished reputation. The bank classified this colossal blunder as a “near miss.” That’s putting it mildly.
This wasn’t Citigroup’s first rodeo with massive mistakes. In 2020, they accidentally wired $900 million to Revlon creditors and spent two years in court battles trying to get it back. Then in 2022, they caused a European stock selloff that wiped out €300 billion in market value. Their track record isn’t exactly stellar.
Regulators have noticed. Citigroup got slapped with a $400 million fine in 2020 for risk management failures and another $136 million in 2023 for not fixing things fast enough. The bank has paid a total of $536 million in regulatory fines since 2020. Senator Elizabeth Warren has even suggested the bank is “too big to manage.” Hard to argue with that assessment when you’re misplacing trillions.
The bank reported 10 similar billion-dollar-plus transaction errors in 2023. That’s actually an improvement from 13 the previous year. Progress, I guess?
CEO Jane Fraser is supposedly prioritizing these issues, investing in compliance and technology while pushing to eliminate manual entry processes. Because apparently in 2024, one of the world’s largest financial institutions still has people typing in numbers by hand. Who knew?
The incident highlights broader industry challenges in risk management, with the average data breach now costing $4.45 million. But most companies manage to avoid the trillion-dollar typos. For Citigroup, it’s just another day at the office. Banking’s never boring when you’re playing with trillions.
